Our English alphabet is taken from the classic Roman alphabet, which did not contain the letters J, U, or W. These three letters came into being during the medieval period. The letter V is an old letter, introduced by Roman Emperor Claudius in 44 C.E.. We often see it used as the letter U. Our letter W is a ligature, made of a pair of the letter V. It is called double U because it was written UU or VV. We see that early printers often used VV when they simply did not have a W in their type case. Below are three different examples of the W from “The Generall Historie of Virginia, New-England and the Summer Isles . . .” by Captaine Iohn (John) Smith, 1624.

    Who loves to live at home . . .